Baku, May 18, AZERTAC

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has had an expanded meeting with President of the Republic of Lithuania Gitanas Nausėda.

Addressing the event, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said:

-Mr. President, members of delegation, welcome once again to Azerbaijan. We just had a very good and very broad discussion with Mr. President on different important issues of our bilateral cooperation and also regional development and of course, EU-Azerbaijan cooperation. We see that there is a big similarity in our views. With respect to the development of bilateral ties, we are very optimistic. We discussed with Mr. President the areas in economic sector which we consider to be promising and today, members of delegations I think already started their communication and we will continue it. Because it is important to establish a direct personal contacts between people who are responsible for different areas. Of course, business forum is very promising. I know that there will be documents signed but also important is that the direct contacts will be established between our business circles. The areas of potential cooperation we discussed with Mr. President, are really very broad starting from IT to agriculture, tourism, energy, renewable sources of energy, transportation. I think we can achieve very good results, because we have a very good political background. And the official visit of the President is an important factor in bilateral relations and also there is a common understanding about how to develop EU-Azerbaijani ties. We are very grateful to Lithuanian government and President for supporting Azerbaijan’s plans with respect to close cooperation with EU. Of course, we need to take this good opportunity to strengthen bilateral ties. Of course, we discussed broadly regional configuration and the process of normalization between Azerbaijan and Armenia. I know that President is visiting Armenia after Azerbaijan. So, I am sure he will have a full picture after he completes this visit but our position is very open. We want to sign peace agreement with Armenia. We want to normalize relations and to turn the page of hostility. So, Mr. President, there are a lot of things to discuss between the delegation members. Once again, welcome and thank you for paying a visit to Azerbaijan.

President of Lithuania Gitanas Nausėda said:

-Thank you Mr. President. Really, you already mentioned the issues we had the opportunity to discuss and among them security situation in the region and broadly speaking, then our cooperation in many fields and economic cooperation is especially important. This is the reason why together with me there is a delegation of our vice ministers, vice minister of economy, transport and education is together and vice minister of agriculture. We already described the areas which could be very promising, especially just seeking for larger trade turnover between our countries. I already saw that import from Azerbaijan increased several times. Unfortunately, it was not a case regarding our export but, anyway, we are happy that you are doing well. But speaking seriously, I see the big potential to increase our cooperation in the fields which are becoming more and more important for Lithuania and those are the sectors with high value added. Fintech, ICT, biotechnologies, but of course, traditional sectors are important too. Food products in Lithuania was traditionally very strong in export of food products and we sell the largest part of our export in European Union market and you can imagine that requirements of European Union market are very high.